On Twitter, Instant Gratification and Blogging

After months of resistance, I signed up to Twitter yesterday evening. It felt a bit like going ice skating for the first time. Kind of weird and chaotic until you've done a few laps. This is a bad anaolgy, actually, as I don't ice skate.

Very quickly, I realised the appeal. It was so easy to sign up and immediately, you're having this conversation in real time with people you already 'know'. And not only are you not obliged to articulate detailed thoughts - you can't articulate detailed thoughts (at least not a single tweet). So there's a freedom in that. And then the instant gratification of getting immediate feedback. And the fact that it doesn't matter if you get none because you've expended so little on your tweet.

As it happens, I've been doing a lot of thinking recently in my legal life around the whole subject of change and fitness, flexibility and agility and the appropriateness of old, institutional models (identify a need, form a steering group, write a paper - by the time it comes to implement it, things have moved on). It's a big challenge for all business.

Similar ideas have cropped in blogland e.g. RRRJessica's recent(ish) Monday links post that featured 'institutional' professional reviewers rubbishing amateur reviewers.

Even in the five short years I've part of the romance community (indeed, even in the three years I've been blogging) there's been this vast levelling really, of online interaction; a huge move away from hierarchy to mutual engagement. A shift in the fundamental dynamics.

The fact that blogs have a sense of private individual jurisdiction gives them a very different feel to Twitter. The blogger, to a great extent, sets the tone and the agenda. And subtler hierarchies can come into play too, in the form of a blogger's 'inner circle'. I'm sure there are 'flocks' on Twitter that work like this too, but it's fundamentally a purely public arena.

Recently I've been feeling that I've worked out what the real appeal of blogging is for me and it's the flexibility of the form and how it can be used to communicate something actually different and more personal than a traditional review. I think I need that, regardless of the level of engagement I get.

Twittering, I can see, fulfils a different need, a different desire. Not so much a need to express as a need to engage. It's parallel but different.

What do you think?